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Biography

New York, United States
(1972 – present)

Over the past three and a half decades, the voice of Janis Siegel - a nine-time Grammy winner and a seventeen-time Grammy nominee - has been an undeniable force in The Manhattan Transfer’s diverse musical catalog. Alongside her career as a member of this longstanding musical institution, Siegel has also sustained a solo career that has spawned more than a half dozen finely-crafted solo albums and numerous collaborative projects, amassed a large international fan base and garnered consistently high critical praise.

Born July 23, 1952 in Brooklyn, New York, Siegel learned about the music business at an early age. By the time she was 12, she was singing with an all-girl pop trio called The Young Generation. By the time she and her bandmates had graduated from high school, they had released two singles: “The Hideaway” (b/w “Hymn of Love”) on Red Bird Records, and “It’s Not Gonna Take Too Long” (b/w “Diggin’ You”) on Kapp Records. “At that time, I was exclusively listening to pop music,” Siegel recalls. “When Motown became popular, I fell head over heels for it, as well as for people like Aretha Franklin. And of course, I went insane over the Beatles. But I also loved Barbra Streisand. And living in Brooklyn, I saw a lot of Broadway shows too.” On the jazz side, she remembers John Coltrane as her musical idol during her high school and college years. After graduating from high school, the trio shifted from pop to acoustic folk and rechristened themselves Laurel Canyon. Siegel studied nursing for a couple years, but left college in the early ’70s to focus all of her energies on Laurel Canyon.